If you’re a convinced Lana Del Rey adorer, however, like those who waited outside the Shrine Expo Hall from virtually sun-up Friday morning so they could get close enough to squeal into the chanteuse’s glamorous face later that night, you’re probably convinced that all music scribes are as deaf as they are dumb.

She certainly has garnered more than her share of detractors. After a half-year of blogosphere hype fueled by YouTube sensations – with the sublime, zeitgeist-tapping love song “Video Games” as her calling card – the alluring singer with the tropical moniker (whose career began under her given name, Elizabeth “Lizzy” Grant) started 2012 drowned in a deluge of hate.

Much of it, of course, stemmed from her somnambulistic appearance onSaturday Night Livethat January, an undeniably nervous and pitchy performance made instantly infamous thanks to its pre-release timing. Even typically opinion-free NBC news anchor Brian Williams declared it “one of the worst outings inSNLhistory,” and its weakness tainted nearly every review of Del Rey’s major-scale introduction,Born to Die.

Never mind that two weeks later she was markedly more confident in a riveting turn on David Letterman’s show, or that her rich contralto is one of the most expressive voices to emerge this decade. You could still taste the venom in teardowns from Rolling Stone, the New York Times and plenty of others, all of them deeming her unprepared, ill-equipped, all about artifice – a pose without poise.

Maybe that was so, two years ago. But it isn’t now.

What at first looked like a pouty-lipped model singing away her alcoholic adolescence amid down-tempo, David Lynchian atmosphere is instead rapidly but gracefully developing into a generational icon. A humble one, too: “Everyone who's here,” she told her devotees, many only slightly younger than herself (28 next month), “we're all on the same level.” Indeed, her every tragically romantic couplet and frank suggestion seems to resonate with a certain under-25 audience – particularly young women who pack her shows, whether they’ve also lived too fast (and thus identify with her) or merely yearn for a walk on the wilder side (and so glorify her).

In both the sensual languor of “Video Games” and the fiercer desire coursing through “Gods and Monsters” and “Ride,” standouts from her LP-length follow-up EPParadise, Del Rey’s persona provides vicarious danger and seedy thrills as if she really were “living like Jim Morrison,” a fallen angel in a white mini-dress captured by lustful devils. “You’re no good for me,” she purrs, “but baby, I want you.”

Therein lies another reason why, critics be damned, her first album went platinum here and sold 4 million more worldwide: Pulsating with sexual longing that flirts with the hardcore, LDR’s slow-burn soar is supreme bedroom music. (No wonder Kanye West and Kim Kardashian asked her to sing “Summertime Sadness” at their pre-nuptial reception in Paris. Perhaps North West was conceived to the sound of it.)

Strewn throughout even her most graphic fantasies, however, is the fatalistic sadness her album’s title implies. That above all is what magnetizes her minions in ways I haven’t seen since the mid-’90s, when Fiona Apple’sTidalwave came crashing in and similarly seductive Tori Amos shook up the alt-rock landscape withLittle Earthquakes.

Yet there’s a fervency about Del Rey’s fans – witness the over-the-top outpouring that greeted her remarkable Coachella sets last month – that goes well beyond any intensity either of those forebears experienced. She attracts the sort of “finally someone understands me” idolization largely reserved for Morrissey and the Cure’s Robert Smith these past 30-some years.

At the Shrine, even more so than in Indio – where she had to emote to a tens-of-thousands sprawl, not just a huddled mass – she seemed genuinely touched by the ecstatic response, beaming both during songs (as the crowd’s singing grew louder) and between them (when overcome screams became deafening). In that smiling reaction as well as her powerful vocals – theSNLincident was clearly a fluke; she can out-wail most of her peers – you could detect something beyond redemption. More like empowerment, especially as this final date of a victory lap behind her output thus far comes two weeks before the release of her next album,Ultraviolence.

She previewed a pair from it inside the Expo Hall, and yes, it’s more of the same. There was the sinister single “West Coast,” a leaner groove with an ooh-baby-ooh-baby coo borrowed from Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” that went down a storm with fans who have already absorbed it. Later, she unveiled the title track, another slice of cinematic rock – which, like everything else in her catalog, owes its strengths as much to her supporting band as it does Del Rey’s controlled vision.

It remains to be seen how far she can extend that without radicalizing focus – or will she become another Sade, tantalizing every so many years with only slightly updated variations on established forms? Monolithic if not monochromatic, her style can become a one-dimensional dead-end after you savor a couple hours of it. And there’s an irrefutable impenetrability about her: No matter how sincerely she presents herself to acolytes, her act serves as a protective shield the real Lizzy Grant can hide behind.

Real or fake, doesn’t matter – she’s a riveting presence with grand potential. Given another perfect commercial storm like the publicity twister that flung her into the Top 10, she could sweep the Grammys or nab an Oscar with the right ballad, another new classic like “Video Games.” Decades from now, when she’s as established (but not as boring) as Céline Dion is today, how amusing it will be to look back at her controversial start and laugh at both her baby steps and the critics who thought she’d never learn to walk.

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